Your Ideas

Your Ideas is a special blog section of the Aspen Public Radio website. It's a place where you can engage with a broad range of people from the Roaring Fork Valley and beyond who will share the political, economic, scientific, medical, artistic and other thoughts with you. It is a place where reasoned opinions are welcomed and lively debate is encouraged.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We are very excited to share the travels of Simi Hamilton’s family to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Over the next few weeks we’ll be sharing dispatches from Ruthie Brown and family as they give you a first-hand, “behind-the-scenes” look at the Olympics.

It could be an overly nuanced distinction to folks who don’t live in the mountains and spend much time in the woods, but I’ll make the case anyway: winter camping and hut trips are two very different experiences. One requires a tolerance for cold and a degree of suffering most people would prefer to pass up; the other involves cozy accommodations, light packs and comfy mattresses. Both usually include spectacular winter scenery and close friends.

I spend a lot of time trying to keep myself informed about current political affairs, but it often seems to be a futile effort. The same subject can be reported with wildly divergent information in competing publications. What is the poor reader to do? And how is the public to make any sense of this?